Mobile Portrait Studio [Photography]

The Mobile Portrait Studio considers the role of portraiture, photography, performance, and public spaces in relationship to art-making, memory, and historical narratives. This project draws on traditions of portrait photography combined with contemporary understandings of art in the public sphere and performance. I set up the Mobile Portrait Studio with a camera, a mobile mini printer, and lighting. Then, I ask passersby to participate in the project by having their portrait taken. Participants receive a free print within minutes of sitting (or standing, as the case may be) for the portrait. The portraits are given to participants and also preserved digitally as part of a larger series of photographs. Through the acts of portraiture, narrative, and engagement in public spaces I hope to document our contemporary moment as well as create moments for interaction with the arts and each other. Do we walk by each other without acknowledgement? Who is afraid of who in the public space of the street? Mobile Portrait Studio activates public space through art practices that breathe new life into spaces that might otherwise distance diverse publics.

Place, as much as the people, play a significant role in Mobile Portrait Studio. The project is completed using the cityscape as backdrop, creating a portrait of the place parallel to human experience, at that moment. So far this project has been completed in four locations: during Art Basel/Art Fair Week in Miami outside the Rubell Collection in Wynwood, Florida, and inside the Convention Center in Miami Beach, Florida, as well as in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago along Ariapita Avenue and at Alice Yard, a collective contemporary art space. Plans are underway for Mobile Portrait Studio in additional locations. If you would like to collaborate, get in touch.

Mobile Portrait Studio was featured in Nueva Luz's En Foco in Winter 2011 and in the exhibition, Social in Practice: The Art of Collaboration, in 2014.